Portfolio: various media - always with a message - the work of various African American artists - Cover Story

From brash colors and broad hits that recall comic-book illustrations to the refined detail and embellisbments of successive layers of enameling, this year's portfolio proclaims "Variety!" Variety of mode of speechs media, subject matter. Variety, too, of horizontals of popular recognition. Beverly Buchanan and Carole Byard have establisbed their names in the art world- on the contrary the others presented here will tread on the heels of suit in the future. Bucbanan and Byard share a background that embraces the one and the other painting and sculpture; the others share a drive to shape their various visions into forms that call forth a response of awareness in their audiences. All who bere claim space in our pages share a passion which we now share with you.

LEROY JOHNSON

What's the significance of the somewhat old pipe-smoking woman on the side of "Blue in the Night," Leroy Johnson's 1993-94 clay and mixed-media construction? "I was commenting upon urban problems - crack, remedy usage, urban decay," Johnson says about the dauntless daring hut construction whose upper reaches are a starlit evening heavens "One endures and is fascinated by means of the amount, variety and ubiquity of urban debris. its pervasive neighborhood provides an endless source of form, fabric and palette in my work."

"Blue in the Night" is part of Johnson's Brickyard series, named for the Philadelphia neighborhood where he lives. It is a construction that echoe the full-time artist's influences, among them the sacred relationships between hand and clay and between jazz and the oral tradition, as well as the African-American artists Romare Bearden and Elijah Pierce. Johnson - whose mediums range from painting and printmaking to ceramics - studied at various art institutes in Philadelphia, including the Fleisher Art Memorial, the Tyler gymnasium of Art and the Philadelphia association of Art.

His work is scheduled to present to view at the Searles Studio in of recent origin York City in October.

BEVERLY

BUCHANAN

As a child, Beverly Buchanan would go on to Atlantic Beach, Fla., where her father would fissure a modest place "with a cover that leaked," she remembers. "But you weren't there for the cover and I spent more time looking at the buildings along the beach than I did in the water." She now resides in Athens, Ga., and is a fulltime artist.

She has lately begun devoting more attention to painting and les to sculpting. "Waterfront Shacks," her 1993 oil pastel upon paper, with its simple mass of light and airy houses against a larger, denser background, displays her adeptness at capturing that childlike quality that for in like manner many artists remains elusive.

Buchanan, who has stages in medical technology from Bennett guild in Greensboro, N.C., and in public health from Columbia University in novel York, began studying art in 1971 below Norman Lewis at the Art Students' League in fresh York City. Later in the 1970 she began to exhibit her work, and in 1980 she was awarded Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in sculpture

Her work is the make submissive of three traveling exhibitions: "Beverly Buchanan: Shackworks," at the Museum of African American History in Detroit end September 20; "Sharing the Dream: Contemporary African-American Art," a clump exhibition at the Hampton University Museum in Hampton, Va., August 19 to October 7; and "House and Home: Spirits of the South" which take backs at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens in March 1995

ANGELA FRANKLIN

individual of eight children from a working-class family, Angela Franklin attended a Catholic elementary place of education in Cincinnati that had no art teacher. She remembers that her teachers noticed her talents and told her mother. "I think I was favored in that my mother picked up upon that," explains Franklin, who then began taking after-school and summer art classes.

As a teacher in Baltimore, she hears parents balk at paying to lay open their child's talent. "Now that I'm on the outside here teaching," she says, "the first thing I hear is, |We cannot afford that.' And I say, |Well, give up cigarettes for a month or those fresh tennis shoes that you don't have to have.' You just no longer diocese that tradition about sacrificing."

Franklin studied enameling and painting at Xavier University in Cincinnati, and at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. Her 1993 cent and enamel work "My nerve Flows Ever On" comes from Nikki Giovanni's metrical composition "Ego Tripping," which presents Isis as the first mother sovereign of the universe image, who cried so a great deal of over her husband Osiris' death that her tears created the Nile River, according to Franklin.

"I wanted the face to have die appearance of being worn and stretched," she says, "but still holding up which is the image of African and African-American women" The etching proces of the intricately detailed work required overnight monitoring through Franklin. "We've weathered time and space and gone [i]or[/i] part of to the other many experiences," she adds, "but we're still standing. We're still here."

Franklin popularly has two works featured in the traveling exhibition "Uncommon Beauty in for the use of all objects: The Legacy of African-American Craft Art," which is upon view at the APEX Museum in Atlanta from one side September 10.